Particularly in the medical context, the handling is effected increasingly by way of data processing devices and on the computer basis. By way of example, a large number of different applications are available for performing surgical, robot-controlled interventions, for examination, for data archiving, etc. In the area of imaging medicine, it is necessary for the image data acquired to be processed and stored. To this end, it is useful to copy individual image contents or whole images from an application and to paste them again at a different location.
In the prior art, this is accomplished by resorting to short-term memories, what are known as clipboards, that can be used to store content to be transferred so that it can be accessed later. The clipboard functionality can therefore be used for executing copy and paste commands. As described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,964,834, for example, a respective clipboard may be associated with a processor in a wired computer network in this case.
In the clinical context, mobile application appliances (laptops, PDAs, mobile sensor appliances, such as blood pressure/sugar measuring appliances etc.) are also used to an increasing extent. The copy and paste functionality also needs to be available for mobile application appliances.
Furthermore, it is necessary to take into account that the medical image data records usually comprise security-critical content that needs to be processed and treated with access protection. It is thus necessary to ensure that patient-identifying details (e.g. name, age, sex, place of residence, etc.) do not cross the boundaries of the respective access-protected environment in combination with image data or image data segments. These access-protected contents are called “protected health information (PHI)”.
For security reasons, it is therefore not possible for the standard useful copy and paste functionality, which is known from word processing programs, for example, also to be made available in the area of clinical medicine, since these techniques do not allow the medical data protection criteria to be observed.
In the prior art, it was therefore customary to anonymize the image contents and to store the generated anonymized image data records and also to make them available outside the application or outside the workflow.